Ban Zhao
Essay title: Ban Zhao
Throughout the Chinese history, Ban Zhao is the first and the most highly esteemed female historian. Despite her education, accomplishments, and family background, she wrote the Lessons for Women advising women to be submissive to their husbands and teaching them the proper demeanors. Ban Zhao would not be considered an example of resistance of female oppression according to her teaching and writing. However, she may be regarded as a trailblazer for women to have a full participant in the literary and intellectual activity of the court while the women during the time should stay home and manage the household.
Ban Zhao may be seen as a mouthpiece for an oppressive sexist system or a pioneer for women to be scholars or to even hold places in the office. She is a woman who seeks accomplishment and duty that passed on by her father and brothers but at the same time, had an unswerving allegiance to feudal rites and ethics, which, she maintained, and should never be transgressed.
At the age of fourteen, she was married to a man named Cao, who died shortly after the birth of their son. Ban Zhao remained in the Cao family and did not remarried according to the strict Confucian principles. She took her role as a mother to raise her son, and as a daughter-in-law to serve her mother-in-law,